Notorious R.O.B.

Glenn Kelman at Redfin posted a great article yesterday about working at a technology company in Seattle.  I’ve spent a bit of time in Seattle working at a game company out there, and I remember it fondly.  A great city in so many ways.

He contrasts the Seattle tech culture with that of the Valley’s, and draws the conclusion that

Because if it turns out that Zillow, iLike or Redfin are on to something good, it may be easier to build a long-term business in Seattle. Ten years on at Microsoft, engineers deep in Redmond’s rain forests are still writing the next version of Office. Meanwhile the engineers at Google are, as Zillow’s Rich Barton points out, plotting their next startup on the company dime.

I’m not sure which engineers one would rather have, but it is true that there is a blue-collar dedication in Seattle that you don’t find in the ADD-addled Valley. “You work hard here because it’s gray,” Rich writes. “Then you go hiking or fishing or skiing.”

Then Drew Meyers over at Zillow blog comments that:

I can attest to the fact that we definitely follow the work hard, play hard motto here at Zillow. I’ve heard those in the valley sometimes forget the 2nd half of that motto.

He then asks: “Which environment/culture do you prefer?”

Well, speaking from a tech/data company in New York City, I guess I feel like I’m witnessing a competition between a daycare center and a kindergarten about who’s more hardcore, and who can be more productive.

I think New York firms have the “work hard, then work hard some more” philosophy.  It’s just in the air in this place.  Dominated as we are by investment banking, global finance, and corporate law, it’s just way too easy to get into conversations like this one at the rare cocktail party:

“Man, I pulled an all-nighter on Tuesday to get the XYZ deal done.”

“Yeah?  I had to pull TWO all-nighters in a row to get my deal done.”

“You guys are pussies — I haven’t been home in two weeks working on my gazillion-dollar merger.”

It’s difficult to think that you’re working all that hard when you know that as you’re leaving the office at 8pm, the working day just got going for those Harvard and Wharton MBA’s in the huge skyscraper across the street from you.  You see the dozens of food delivery guys scuttling through their doors carrying dinners for people likely hunched over documents in conference rooms, and you feel vaguely guilty that you only worked twelve hours that day knowing those boys and girls are likely to be greeting the dawn still in their suits.

A lawyer friend of mine told me that he got home once after a particularly brutal week of drafting some ginormous loan agreement and found a strange woman asleep in his bed.  So he woke her up, wondering if his roommate had let a friend sleep in his room or something.  She goes, “I’m your wife, you bastard.”

I happen to be fortunate that OnBoard cares about things like… oh, I don’t know… employee sanity.  But I get these incredulous stares from friends in law or finance when I tell them that no, I don’t routinely work Saturdays and Sundays, and that I do tend to leave the office around 6 or 7.

So which environment/culture do I prefer?

Well, the blue-collar laid-backness of Seattle seems awfully nice.  But then the hyper-connected innovation of Silicon Valley also seems nice.  They both seem so… nice.  And innovative.  And productive for developing technology.

And yes, you may view this entire post as a giant sour grapes “I hate you all” screed motivated by enormous envy.   One day, maybe, New York will have a tech culture worth talking about at all.

-rsh

Update: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch takes down Glenn.

Update #2: Glenn responds.  I remain envious of both Seattle and Silicon Valley.

Over at the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog, Joel Burslem celebrates Halstead’s incorporation of New York magazine’s neighborhood profiles on their website. But then he goes on to make what I think is an outrageous claim:

It also signals to me that more brokers are waking to the reality that they themselves are media publishers and therefore need to start acting like them. Inking content deals for their sites is part of that, but so is exploring trends like syndication and distribution for their own content (i.e. listings).

Say what now?

I don’t know Joel, but I’m sure he’s a brilliant guy. And like many brilliant guys, he appears to have forgotten some simple truths.

The business model matters.

What I mean, quite simply, is that how a company actually makes money means something. Calling real estate brokers a “media publisher” doesn’t make them one anymore than calling a pile of poop “caviar” does.

The media business is pretty straightforward in how it makes money. It either (a) sells the content via subscriptions or some other pay-by-consumer model, or (b) cons convinces some company to pay to advertise to the consumers of content. As long as money coming in is greater than the money spent on creating and distributing the content, you’re in the media business, baby! Trulia and Zillow are in the media business (until they’re not, of course, but we’re assured, assured, that will never happen by Trulians and Zillowites).

In stark contrast, the real estate brokerage business makes money upon the closing of a transaction in which a piece of real property goes through a change in legal status. Typically, that’s a transfer of title. But it could also be the execution of a lease, creating a leasehold estate. The brokerage makes money by commissions tied to the final sale/lease price. What the heck does that have to do with the media business?

The content is given away for absolutely nothing, because that ‘content’ is nothing more than advertising, promotion, and marketing for the underlying asset. This is tantamount to claiming that J. Crew is actually a media company because it puts out a catalog.

If real estate companies were to actually act like media companies, they would be inking deals wherein publishers would pay them for their content (aka, listings), or they would get some other company to pay them money to put advertising on their content (aka, listings).

Alas and alack, the legal status of listings is very much up in the air, I’m afraid. After all, who owns the listing? Is it the agent? The seller? The MLS? The brokerage company? The mega national franchise networks such as Century 21?

If the national Century 21 organization (a division of Realogy) inked a deal with Google to send it listings for $1/listing, would the lawyers for the various MLS’es and agents and brokers break the sound barrier in getting to the courthouse to file a suit? Or just fall short of Mach 1?

Look, I dig what Halstead has done from a technical standpoint. As a web guy, I like the user interface, the clean but functional design, and the map integration. But let’s not get carried away here.

From a strategic standpoint, what Halstead has done is properly described as “brand suicide”. Halstead has essentially told every single visitor to the Halstead website, “Our agents know jackshit about the neighborhoods in which they are supposedly experts.” If you want to know where to move to in New York City, don’t ask the boys and girls at Halstead — no, go read New York magazine. That, my friends, is brand suicide.

If real estate is local, then presumably the value of real estate agents is local knowledge. Farm that out to some publication, and you’ve essentially made your real estate agent a glorified paperwork clerk. But, oh yeah, pay me 6% please! That makes for a very compelling value proposition.

Why are we celebrating this again?

What Halstead should have done instead is to make sure that every single agent on its roster is in fact a local neighborhood expert. If you sell million dollar condos in SoHo, sister, you’d better know where to go for the best sushi dinner, which dry cleaner will wreck my $4,500 Brioni suit and which one won’t, and where I can take my dogs for grooming. You’d best know which elementary school my kids will be attending if I buy this condo vs. that condo. Then, Halstead should have done everything in its power to brand those agents as local experts, and kicked New York magazine to the curb.

But I guess it’s easier to take the lazy way out and ink a deal with New York. That way, you could be described as a “media publisher” too, while you flush your brand down the toilet.

-rsh